Mr. McDonald, whose action-figure dioramas appeared in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, was part of the Art Club 2000 collective and worked at Colin de Land’s American Fine Arts gallery for more than 10 years, until it closed in 2004. He talks about all of that in the great, lengthy interview. He also talks a bit about his jewelry line, which he produced for years under the name Mended Veil. He stopped making jewelry in 2009, though, and has been focusing on his art. Why the change? Here’s the relevant section:

I was also getting tired of the fashion cycle, having to do 2 big collections every year and doing production the rest of the time. I was invited to be in a show and that’s when I first started making these pieces. I had been collecting action figures and playing with them, on top of my TV or whatever. For me that work went back to my initial influences in LA and the kind of art I was making at that time – people from the beat generation, doing awesome assemblage and found object art – combining that with my influences having worked at American Fine Arts. I wanted to make stuff about my life and the people around me. I live in a shitty tenement apartment, even though it’s now in a prime real estate area of New York, this is a run down old place. I started thinking about getting older and being an artist but living an outmoded lifestyle that doesn’t really have much play anymore. That seemed like the right format to work with those kinds of things. I see myself as a little bit of an outsider artist as well, even though I’m very much an insider in the art world.